


Abyss

by Luciferstea



Series: Phantom's soliloquy of Hallownest [1]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Chapter Lengths May Vary, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Multi, Other, Pale king kinda sucked, Phantom has a potty mouth, Phantom is sorta illiterate at first, Poor Phantom has ptsd, Struggling, dont hunt me down for it, gijinkas?, im no doctor, mention of injury, or well, semi human i guess, so some of these things might be (or are) medically inaccurate, some aditional tags to be added as i go, some self harm triggers, they're written as human, this gets dark fast, watch me fuck up my Oc, white lady regrets her wrongdoings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 07:01:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22491964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luciferstea/pseuds/Luciferstea
Summary: no one ever said Phantom's ascent out of the Abyss was a task without pain.
Relationships: Phantom/Samael, The Pale King/White Lady (Hollow Knight), the pale king/ Phantom
Series: Phantom's soliloquy of Hallownest [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1618216
Kudos: 4





	1. Downfall

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warning: if you can't handle descriptions of bodily harm, probably innacurate medical procedures and mental trauma, I'd suggest that maybe don't read this one chief.  
> also swearing, Phan has a potty mouth, and the void gets to hear it loudly.

He’s fucked, both mentally and physically

Mentally because he’s dealing and trying to cope, he’s doing his best alright?

But physically? He’s extremely fucked up.

Especially right now.

He’s thrown off a high balcony, and he’s trying to catch himself on ledges or something, flapping those useless wings sure as hell doesn’t work.

Then he hits a ledge, face first, and parts of his mask just Explode and shatter into his face, impaling themselves in random spots, leaving a ‘cracked’ bloody mess all over his face.

The impact doesn’t only break his mask, it breaks his nose, his lacrimal, probably on both sides, his orbital bone, his jaw, his Zygomatic. It’s all broken and it hurts.

He’s blind in an instant, mostly due to the blood in his eyes, of which one is flickering in and out of vision, and it also immediately takes away his ability to speak, thanks to a fucked jaw.

Not all of his body landed on the ledge, only the upper parts, and whilst he’s desperately attempting to do whatever, he doesn’t want to fall again, no more, his face hurts so, so badly, but the only noises he can make are these weird half gurgle- half wails of agony, and he can’t even recognize his own voice, it’s so warped. But that might be because of how hard his ears are ringing.

Despite his desperate scrambling, his lower body weight doesn’t want to cooperate, and he finds himself falling again, falling and falling.

His back hits the floor cluttered with corpses of his siblings, the impact knocks all the remaining air out of him, but at least it wasn’t his face again right?

He lays there for a while, he’s not quite sure how long. With his state of mind it might have been days or weeks or even a month. In reality, it was an hour or two, but he has no way of telling the time and it felt incredibly long.

All he knows is that his face hurts, his head aches, everything hurts, and he doesn’t want to move. Moving hurts, he wants the hurt to go away, please, please go away.  
He wasn’t aware the abyss had life besides his own flickering one, but it does. Small orbs of void float above him, seemingly pulling themselves in and out of existence, much like the shades of his siblings he occasionally notices floating by. 

Watching, it’s all he can do at the moment, it doesn’t require much thinking or focusing, so his brain, which he’s pretty sure is now a pile of mush, or it at least feels that way, doesn’t hurt that bad. Sure one of his eyes has gone dark, and he’s not quite sure if he wants to know what it looks like or what it even means.

Some of the shades that drift by notice his situation, and they float over him for a few seconds, inspecting him before disappearing, probably disappointed that their biggest sibling is such a mess.  
But he’s thinking again, and thinking hurts.

But he can’t stop thinking.

Surely sleep couldn’t hurt? 

He drifts on the edge of sleep for a while, before eventually falling into a dreamless sleep.

He figured he should move, even if at least a little. The bones and shattered masks were uncomfortable to lay on, besides, he’s pretty sure that his second fall, the one who landed him in the spot to begin with, probably impaled him slightly on some sharp edges. Mainly because his back hurts and feels oddly warm and wet in some spots. 

But then again, it’s not like he can look at the moment. One of his eyes has gone dark, and the other is bruised and a bit swollen.

To say moving hurts is an understatement, his whole body, but mainly his head aches with every small step he manages to take.

Speaking of his steps, they’re uncoordinated and clumsy. His legs are shaky and he still can’t think clearly. The terrain certainly isn’t helping either. It leaves him a stumbling mess, and he hates to think about how stupid he probably looks like. 

He’s been trying to call out to anyone, anything for a while now, but his broken jaw makes it impossible for him to properly enunciate anything besides pathetic, pained cries and gurgly wails.  
It takes him what feels like forever, but eventually, he makes it to the sea of void that simply by existing tells him he can’t move forward right now.

He sinks down at the black shoreline, tired beyond belief. And he lets out heavy breaths.

The endless void sea refuses to show any reflection when he peers into it from a bit away, maybe that’s a good thing. He doesn’t actually want to know what his face looks like right now anyways.

He lays back again, ignoring the sharp stabs of pain that shoot through his back and head. He’s surprised this place even has a ceiling, he figured it’d go up forever.

The lighthouse looms above him like a giant predator, ready to leap on its prey. 

When did they turn out the light up there? he briefly wonders as he looks at the sea of void, which reacts aggressively to just about anything being held up over it. He’s no expert, that wasn’t his job, but wasn’t the lighthouse there specifically to keep the sea calm?

Err, well, the calmest it could possibly seem.

He briefly touches a hand to his face, recoiling it quickly when the sting registers. His fingers come back stained with liquid void. So he is still bleeding somewhere. Great.

He lays there for a while, wondering, wondering about everything, about his father, about his sibling, about their mother.

What’s going to happen now?  
~~~~~~  
The lighthouse seemed like the next step, it’d be easier to recover in a place he wouldn’t be at a constant threat after all. But he hadn’t anticipated just how tall this tower would be, and also he hadn’t exactly figured how he’d get up there fully.

His body hurts as he manages to hoist himself up on the first ledge, he shivers in the cold and looks up, trying to see where the nearest ledge is that isn’t too high. Because he really can’t do anything fancy right now.

The trek upwards was already hard enough for him, but apparently life hates anything he does right now, so the siblings that were idly floating by and not paying him any mind, had now decided that since he was going to the lighthouse and probably going to turn it on, that they now hated his guts.

‘Great, yeah that’s fine, it’s not like i’m already crawling and crying’. He thinks to himself, the only noise coming out of him another pained moan as a sibling launched one of their void ball attacks at his face.

He tries to take a stand, but his soul gauge and spell veins are empty, and he lost his sword in the white palace, so the only thing he can really do is flail his bruised and cut arms about. He hates everything. He hates how he’s wearing almost nothing but a raggedy old grey cloak, a pair of stained black pants, and a now void stained white blouse, of which one sleeve is torn to hell, thanks to his fall, which almost tore the thing off. He hates how cold it is, you wouldn’t expect there to be wind down here, but it’s as howling and biting as ever, his bare feet don’t do much on the cold floor either. 

He hates his father, hates this stupid tower, hates this damn place, hates how much pain he is in right now, and he hates himself for pulling the stupidest stunt back in white palace. To be fair, he should have known that him doing what he did would cause consequences, but in that moment he couldn’t help it!

He gnashes his teeth together, ignoring the biting ache in his jaw from biting down on the broken bone, the pain is the main factor keeping him awake right now, and despite how much he hates everything right now, things may get a little better once he reaches the top of the lighthouse right?

This was a one way trip anyways, he’d tried the small door at the bottom of the tower, but it was locked from the inside. If he could find a way to unlock it from the inside he’d never have to crawl his way up here again right? He just hoped the door on top of the tower was open, otherwise his effort had been for nothing. He couldn’t break the door to get in, he’s sure he does NOT have the strength for that right now.

He lifts himself up another platform, his ribs scraping painfully against the rough ground.

’one leg up, then the other. Keep moving, can’t afford to stay still for long or I get blasted by one of those shade fuckers’. He thinks to himself.

The siblings get angrier and angrier the further up he crawls, and one of them decides to launch another attack. It dashes through him, and having not expected that, he staggers backwards and as his feet scramble, he can barely manage to save himself on the ledge before he takes another high tumble.

He is however, forced to look at how high up he is. and normally that wouldn’t be a problem, Hallownest is full of impressive heights, many with nice views too. 

But this is not a nice view, in fact, he hates how it looks, despises how similar it looks to the bones he abandoned back there. another fall from this height would surely kill him, and probably turn him into one of the vengeful shades around here.

Truth is, he really doesn’t want to be one of them.

He groans, and lets out something that sounds like a gurgle as he manages to finally reach the door at the top of the tower. Part of him wants to drop down and sleep, but he knows he can’t. not yet. Inside first, then sleep. Everything hurts, but he manages to push it down again.

His cold fingers find the doorknob, and as he turns it, he can almost feel the slightly warmer air hitting him.

But he doesn’t feel slightly warmer air. He only hears the lock click in its slot.

Locked, that’s what that stupid door is.

He almost loses it, a harsh cry escaping him as he bangs his head against the shut door.

A few siblings let out angered noises behind him, and he feels one dash through him again as a void energy ball hits the door by his knees. 

He jumps at the scare, and looks around, then peers into the tower through one of the windows. 

There’s nothing inside but a corpse. He’s not sure who it is, but there’s a corpse there. he can’t see details because its dark inside, but it’s not the current pressing matter. He’ll happily hold the dead body company over these little shady fuckers out here.

There is a small narrow window close by the door, but he hesitates. He doesn’t have enough strength to do that, does he?

He groans, might as well try it before he dies out here.

He can’t do it like this though, not with his bare hands. He knows that.

He hesitantly takes off his grey cloak, and the wind starts biting his skin exposed skin more immediately. 

Wrapping the cloth around his hand once, twice, three times, he takes a step back. Taking a moment to make sure he’s looking at stuff right, since his vision still sucks.

He reels his arm back, and with the mightiest slam he can muster, forces his arm through the glass.

Or well, attempts to. the first hit only splinters the window, but he can’t actually put his hand through yet. On another note, he’s pretty sure that instead of breaking the window, he just broke his hand instead. Great, more broken bones.

Well, he’s halfway there anyways, might as well finish it before his head gets blown off.

His second punch is much more effective, and this time his hand does go through the window. It hurts, but he’s sure it would’ve been worse if he didn’t wrap his hand beforehand.

The door lock is harder to unlock from his side of the door then he thought, but he manages.

Sliding inside, he leans his bulk against the door.

Right, the window. And his err ‘friend’ in the corner, he groans, having to hoist himself back onto shaking legs. they feel weird, it feels like someone stuck hot needles into them. and it’s not even that war in here.

He figures he should board up the window first, considering his poor hand left a bigger hole then he thought. He finds a metal sheet on the floor, and figures that it’ll do for now.

It takes some effort to shove the metal sheet into the window in a way that’ll keep it closed off, but he manages, with aching fingers to make it stay.

He then turns his attention to the body slumped over in the corner. It looks like one of his father’s servants, judging by their clothes.

‘poor soul, father left you like he left me didn’t he?’ he nurses a thought. 

If he weren’t so injured, He might’ve done something more… honorfull, but he can’t muster up the strength to go all the way down. Not again, not now, maybe later.

Sadly, his strength only goes so far, and despite the fact he doesn’t want it to happen, it happens, and the body slips out of his grasp. He only meant to put them outside, but apparently fate said no.

He shields his ears and squeezes his eye shut, not wanting to see or hear the impact with the ground.

He hangs his head in shame as he shuffles back inside, this time locking the door behind him.

There’s a lever in the room, and he figures it’s for the light. he thinks about it for a moment, but he needs some light and warmth right now, so to the lever his hands go.

If he thought he was weak before, he certainly thinks he’s weak now, as his upper body strength just seems to have gone, and he has to force the bulk of his weight against the lever.

It causes him to stumble forward when the lever glides back with more ease, and he just kinda ends up falling forwards, his reflexes kicking in at the last possible moment to shield his already maimed face.

He manages to roll over after a minute of just lying there, attempting to catch his breath. 

Only to be blinded by the white light now illuminating the room.

He lets out a noise somewhat akin to a whine, as he attempts to collect himself.

He’s suddenly very much aware of just how tired he is, and he can’t help but feel himself already drifting off to sleep. He manages to pull his grey cloak around him, somewhat like a blanket.

Despite the fact his entire body stings and aches, he somehow manages to drift off for a while.


	2. the Lighthouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> our protagonist realizes a bit about himself, and wonders just who he really is, as he is without a critical part of himself. also the lighthouse gets explored

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhhhh, this chapter's start has descriptions of injury, which a dumbass with no medical knowledge tries to fix. So warning for that I guess.

Waking up sucks, mainly because he managed to roll over in his sleep, and laid on the bad side of his face for too long.

He groans, managing to will his eye open, and looks around.

The light from the lighthouse did actually make the room a bit warmer though, so he figures that that’s probably the best thing that’s gonna happen today.

He rubs the side of his mask before wincing, feeling and remembering that there ARE in fact, actual shards sticking into his face, and he figures that he should probably attempt to do his best to fix his face, even if he’ll probably end up with a permanently maimed face.

There’s nothing that quite acts like a good mirror, so his translucent reflection in one of the windows will have to do.

The first thing he does is take off the pieces of his mask he can actually take off. And he finds himself staring at the man that stares back at him.

He and the other Hollow knight were never allowed to take off their masks. They were supposed to be faceless knights. Heroes without a face. They were told that, as heroes without a face, the population could possibly see themselves in them or something, he's not quite sure.

He’s never actually seen his own face before. Its weird, it feels weird to look at this… other man he doesn’t know.

The only one who has seen his and his brother’s face before is their father. And he’s not sure how to feel about his father right now.

He zones back in and looks himself in the eye, before looking at all the shards in his face. 

Now that he’s looking at his injuries instead of his face, he notes just how bad he looks. His nose is bent weirdly and a terrible purple color, so is the most of the left side of his face, it looks like someone took a red marker, a purple and a black marker, and slapped him in the left side of his face with them.

His eye socket is weirdly dented and his jaw looks like it’s been moved five inches to the left. 

He whines and wills himself to start pulling the shards out of his face, the majority come out easy, but there are some deeply imbedded in his poor face. He whines as he pulls at one stuck through his cheek.

His hands feel off, they’re so incredibly shaky, he has no clue why. The only thing he knows is that it hurts.

He musters up the courage to do something stupid, and he janks the shard out, it hurts immensely and he starts bleeding void again, but the shard is out at least. Only three more to pull.

It’s an incredibly hard task, and he can barely do it. His strength wavering each time as his brain keeps telling him to stop hurting himself, but he manages to pry and pull the shards out of his face.

He’s crying by the end of it, tears mixing with void and creating translucent grey-black drops on the floor.

Sobbing, he turns his attention to his fucked jaw. It needs to be set back into place, and then probably needs to be shut for a while as the bones reattach themselves. But it’s gonna hurt again, and he hates pain. What if he breaks his jaw off completely? He’s scared, his nose needs to be set too. the only reason he knows that is because, during a practice, he once accidently hit the other Hollow knight in the mask, not knowing what he was doing, and accidently broke their nose. Which their father had to set back in place with him turned away.

He had wanted to apologize after, but their father had told them that injuries were nothing, and they shouldn’t cry or be apologetic about them. then he had remembered the whole ‘no mind to think, no voice to cry suffering, no will to break’ part, and had kept his mouth shut tight.

Ah right, that was the moment he realized he was a defect, wasn’t it? How had he managed to keep his mouth shut for so long anyways? 

Thinking about it, did he deserve his name? back at white palace, he and his sibling had both been given the name ‘Hollow knight’, and together they were the Hollow Knights.

But he wasn’t hollow. He had never been. He was just a very, very good liar.

A liar, that’s what he would be remembered as, wouldn’t he? 

Maybe they would be right to remember him as one.

He wasn’t the Hollow knight, he’d never been, and he never would be. 

Maybe this truly was what he deserved for deceiving the kingdom. Giving them false hope with his face plastered all over it. 

Father was right, he deserved to rot away in here, in this hell with the vengeful spirits of his siblings right outside the door.

He wasn’t the Hollow Knight, he was nobody. Just an old distant echo, a phantom of a time long passed.

He snaps his jaw into place with a crack before he can start thinking about pain again, but the pain itself drives his thoughts back to where they were before he started thinking about how he didn’t deserve anything.

His face burns, and especially when he needs to let go of his jaw to rip a strip of off his cloak to tie around his head. It’s an uneven tear, but he figures its good enough for now, as he manages to tie it around his head.

His nose also makes unpleasant noises as he attempts to set it. The problem here is, he’s never seen his nose before, so he’s not sure how to set it correctly. He sets it straight in the hopes it’ll be good, then breathes out heavily.

he’s still crying when he finishes with his face, and he hates crying, it’s a sign of weakness, is it not? He’s not sure, but everyone in the white palace said so whenever he or a sibling got injured.

He’s vaguely aware that his back, his hand and his ribcage might need some attention too, but he’s already in such pain, and he’s still not sure if he can fix some of the bones in his face he can’t set. 

He groans, wiping his face with his good hand and leans backwards against the wall. Only to wince and figure that, yeah, his back does need attention.

Only problem is that there are spots on his back he can’t quite reach. But he figures maybe he should look first.

When he takes his blouse off, the first thing he notices is the hefty road rash on his ribcage he got from crawling up here, but even though it hurts, it’s scabbing over and doesn’t seem to be the worst.

He has trouble seeing his back in the reflection, mainly because the reflection isn’t great to begin with, but craning his head back far enough to even see his back hurts. So he resorts to just using his fingers to feel if anything’s too pointy and stuck back there.

He finds a few things sticking out, and with effort and shaking hands pulls at them until he can pry them out. The position he’s in is extremely awkward, and his arm hurts from it too, but he doesn’t find as much as he figured he would, which is a good thing, and he hopes that he’s doing the good thing pulling everything out, but he really has no clue. 

~~~~~~~~

He didn’t mean to fall asleep, but he did, leaning against the lighthouse lamp.

At least the light was warm, considering he forgot to button his shirt up all the way, he was tired ok?

Part of him just wants to stay here forever right now, pressed against the only source of heat in this abyss. 

But he knows he’ll have to leave sometime, he may not actually need sustenance, but the sea of void outside seems to have calmed since the light has been on, and he still hasn’t opened the downstairs door, which he should probably do, since he does not want to crawl his way up here a second time.

He figures there’s no hurry in everything though, he’s probably going to be here for a while anyways. Might as well get comfortable right?

He does his best impression of a sigh, since his jaw is bound shut at the moment, then turns his head up to the ceiling, just thinking. 

‘what is father doing today? Eh, probably training Hollow. Maybe Hollow and father are thinking of me? I hope Hollow isn’t, actually, that’d make them defective too. it would be nice to have some company down here, it’s so silent. Even the sea’s gone quiet. I wonder, father spoke about dreamers, what did that mean again? oh right ,seals. Herrah did get ask and receive children, small Hornet and Razor, I like them, those tiny troublemakers. I wonder what the teacher’s boy is going to do when Monomon goes to sleep. What was his name again? Something with a Q I think, I never actually got it. Wanted to ask but remembered to keep my mouth shut. Thinking of dreaming, why did Herrah want children if she was going to sleep for eternity anyways? Seems counterproductive to me, I mean, you ask for children then go on to go nap forever? What’s the point of even having kids then?. Wonder what the prince of Hallownest thinks about this. I hope tiny Whi’le at least lives better. I hope that those children grow up well.’

His thoughts are a jumbled, incoherent mess, but he figures that if something were to ever read his mind, well, at least they’d have a challenge.

He zones back in to grab his ragged cloak off the floor and put it on, remembering to button up his blouse. His hand looks okay-isch, bruised and cut but okay. He’s just happy he didn’t end up breaking another part of his body.

He manages to hoist himself to his feet, brushing his hair out of his face. 

Opening the hatch to the staircase down, he finds himself standing on the cold, metal stairs. It just makes him wish he had shoes really, even socks would’ve been better. He attempts to make his way down the stairs as quickly as possible, noting there are two doors along the stairs, but they’re both locked. He makes another mental note to look for keys. 

His tail bats at the metal stairs, he figures it might’ve come in handy earlier, but honestly, he hates his tail, and he hates his wings. They exist purely to weigh him down and to make him stand out from the others.

He’s not sure how he managed to hide them for so long either, it sure wasn’t easy to hide. His wings a pure void black, and his tail a long black thing with spines on the end of them. they suck.  
But then again, he sucks, so maybe they fit him after all.

Once he reaches the end of the staircase, he unfurls them for a bit. They’re nothing special, honestly, just black wings. But they faintly resemble butterfly and moth wings. And as his father’s knights spoke when he was dragged down here ‘we cannot trust a moth to seal another’.

Is he a moth? He’s not sure, he doesn’t think he is, that’s for sure.

There’s another body near the door. The second lighthouse keeper seems much more taken by the void however, void tendrils securing them in their spot, leaving him unable to move their corpse.  
They do however, have the keys he needs.

Unlocking the downstairs door he steps back out into the outside abyss. And he’s nearly floored by how silent it is. 

There is absolutely no noise anywhere here, besides his own footsteps, and the soft noises his wings make when they accidently rub together. 

He doesn’t like this, he’s not used to silence, he doesn’t like silence and especially not this kind of absolute silence that makes his ears ring and allows him to hear his own heartbeat. 

Huh, he’s been disliking a lot lately hasn’t he? Or at least, he’s come to realize he hates a lot. He didn’t think he was capable of hate before, but look at him go, hating everything now.

His footsteps echo until they reach the black sea. It’s…. odd to see it so calm and flat when it was a boiling, actual living mass before.

This time, he can actually see his own face in the reflection of the water, and he realizes a few more things. 

One, he forgot to put his mask back together, two he forgot to put his mask back on, and three, he looks absolutely terrible. He had attempted not to pay much attention to it, but there are actual holes in his face, and he can probably stick his tongue through the hole in his cheek if he tries.

He shrinks back, not wanting to look anymore. He already knew he looked horrible, thank you.

But he cant help but take another glance, at this new man that he doesn’t know. This new man that’s apparently him, this new unknown man that could be anyone.

He lets out a shuddering breath and holds his hand up, just above the surface of the sea. The man in the reflection does the same, and he lets out another breath he wasn’t aware he was holding.

He has a bit more energy today, so he figures that maybe he should clean up his… mess from the day before. Was it a day? He’s not sure, it feels like it’s been a day.

He turns his attention to the remains, which he kinda figured would be on the floor? But they’re actually somewhat higher up on one of the outcroppings. Great, he’d still have to crawl back up there. granted, it’s less then halfway up, but still.

He’s somewhat glad that the light drove the siblings back. The climb is much easier now that he doesn’t have to worry about being thrown off the damn platforms. 

The corpse isn’t as splattered as he figured it would be, which is good, because it means he wont have to take individual parts down. 

He only realizes this is still going to suck when he figures he’s going to have to climb down with a heavy body on his back. 

He does his best impression of a groan as he manages to get his feet back on the ground, he flaps his wings once, allowing himself a slightly softer landing. Which he now figures he could’ve perhaps tried to do when he was being thrown down in here. But he tried! He honestly did, his wings just suck and they can’t carry him.

He realizes he has no clue what to do with the body once he’s standing on the ground again. His best guess is that he wanted to make sure the remains were out of direct eyesight, but now he’s now sure where to put them.

He leans them against one of the outside walls of the lighthouse for now, he’ll think off something later… probably.

Stepping back inside, he wanders up the stairs again, wondering what’s behind the locked doors he can now unlock with his new ring of keys.

Opening door one, something that probably once used to be a tiny kitchen and living area greets him. The room is dirty and trashed, but as he steps in, he figures that, perhaps if he cleans it up a little, it could be a somewhat nice space. Tiny, but nice.

The next door he opens is a maintenance room, there’s some old machinery in there, and he doesn’t quite get how it works, but maybe he’ll figure it out.

There’s also a mattress on the floor, thin and stained with void, but a mattress nonetheless.

There are no blankets or pillows, and the couch in the small living area is so utterly wrecked and somehow twisted it could probably serve as some weird form of art or something.

He finds some papers on the old machinery, but he and Hollow were never really taught how to read or write, they’re only able to read certain words, like ‘nail, king, defend, knight and fight’, they were only to fight, defend and contain, along with some other stuff, so he has no clue how to tackle these papers, since none of these words match up with words he does know. The only word he knows is ‘king’, but that’s about it.

He puts those papers down for now, vowing to learn to read them sometime. But he has stuff to do now.

He finds a pair of scissors in one of the kitchen drawers, and that’s about it besides a few forks and some spoons, along with some other tool he doesn’t recognize.

He also figures he should clean up the small living area. He does his best, but getting void stains out of things seems to be harder then convincing his father that throwing kids into deep holes is wrong. Which, isn’t an analogy he figured he’d make someday, but he just did, so he’s not quite sure what to think about that.

Dragging twisted remains of a loveseat down steep metal stairs is harder then he hoped it would be, but he probably shouldn’t have expected it to be.

He ends up kinda… parking the ruined couch on the corpse that was downstairs near the door. It sounds kinda cruel when he thinks about it, but at least it’s out of sight. Besides, it’s not like he’s ever going to sit on it, that thing is ruined beyond belief.

‘Just, uhhhhm cover that up I guess. Yeah, no one’s gonna suspect that’ he assures himself in his thoughts.

He drags the thin mattress up the stairs to the observation room. He shoves it as close as he can to the big lamp. It’s warmer in here then it was before, and he very much likes that. 

He leaves his tattered grey cloak on the mattress as he wanders back downstairs, and back into the small kitchenette. He left the papers on the table there, and he wonders if he can decipher some more words.

He finds out, that if he segments the letters of the word ‘king’ he can see that those letters are used in other words. Once he figures that out, he can kind of connect the letters of some of the other words he knows to the page. He’d write down what he’s found out, but he’s not sure how to write either, so he figures he’ll try to learn to read first. 

But eventually he gets too tired to carry on with attempting to figure out how these letters work, and his head hurts, so he drags himself back upstairs and lays back down to sleep through what he assumes is the night.


End file.
